


talk with me now and into the night

by blackorchids



Category: That '70s Show
Genre: Childhood Friends, Developing Relationship, F/M, Friendship, Friendship/Love, Gen, Growing Up Together, Male-Female Friendship, Michael-centric, NOT a love triangle, No cheating, Platonic Female/Male Relationships, Platonic Relationships, Zenmasters Endgame
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-20
Updated: 2019-09-20
Packaged: 2020-10-24 21:44:26
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,403
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20713022
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/blackorchids/pseuds/blackorchids
Summary: Jackie Burkhart becomes Kelso's best friend when she's a bossy little six year old. It isn't always easy, but that kind of friendship lasts.





	talk with me now and into the night

**Author's Note:**

> 1\. uh, warning, I guess?? this fic's endgame is still Jackie and Hyde
> 
> 2\. title from Hannah Montana's ICONIC song, _True Friend_
> 
> 3\. in this timeline, Michael Kelso is child number four of seven Kelso children.

During the summer when Michael is seven, his mom is heavily pregnant with what she and Sue have been calling a _whoops_ while laughing hysterically, so he spends a lot of time away from the house to avoid having to play with Tommy and Mark or fetch his mom gross foods from the fridge.

Susan and Patty are in charge of helping their mom out and putting together a _brand new_ crib, since they’d all expected the twins to be the last of the babies in the house and had since gotten rid of their cribs. Casey disappears every morning at sunrise, spending time at the park or the pool with his friends and refusing to bring Michael along on account of him not wanting to be _embarrassed_.

Since he doesn’t want to hang out with the twins and the girls, Michael goes to work with his dad for a few days, drawing little pictures of cars and aliens on a spare memo pad his dad’s cubicle partner had given him.

On the fourth day at his dad’s job, his dad and several other men in brown suits have to attend a _very important meeting, Michael_, with a scary-strict looking man in a fancy grey suit, who is a lawyer. The man brings along his six year old daughter, a dark-haired, bossy little girl named Jackie that Michael gets along with very easily.

It’s because he gets along with her so well that this lawyer decides to help his dad’s job out with their _important business_, which means Michael’s dad is so proud of him that he buys him a Clark Bar _and_ an Astronaut Ice Cream Sandwich on their way home. 

Jackie’s dad calls Michael’s dad and they agree that Jackie is allowed to hang out with Michael, so, suddenly, he has a new best friend who always has an idea of what they should play. When it gets a little boring between the two of them, he leads her up the three blocks towards the Forman’s house.

That school year, he’d made friends with Eric and Eric’s bodyguard and the orange-haired girl that lives next to him, and he tells Jackie about them on their way there, explaining Eric and Hyde’s weird friendship and that Eric is in love with Donna. Hyde being a bodyguard makes total sense to Jackie, until she finds out he’s the same age as the rest of them.

“Eric has a seven year old as a bodyguard?” she asks, disbelieving, as she follows him down the stairs to the basement. “Wouldn’t he be safer with an older guy, who has muscles?”

“Hyde’s pretty tough,” Michael tells her, and she makes an impressed face that instantly falls when she lays eyes on him, lounging on the new orange couch that Eric’s parents had painstakingly dragged into the basement for a hang-out.

“That’s just _Steven_,” Jackie says, bored, and she ignores Hyde when he corrects her. None of Michael’s friends are too stoked that he’s brought along a _first grader_ into the basement, but when she pulls out a brand new Candy Land, several Hot Wheels cars, and a Barbie and G.I.Joe who are married from her backpack, they play nice.

Jackie and Michael don’t spend _every_ day in the Forman’s basement, though, because Jackie’s daddy always sends her to his house with enough money that they can take a bus to the movies or get into the pool and lay out on the lawn chairs, skin getting golden and hair getting lighter.

Jackie overhears some older girls talking about how cute the boys splashing around in the pool are, and then she and Michael start doing it too, not really _wanting_ like Susan and even Casey do, but curious enough, trying to decide which of them would be nice, like Prince Charming from Cinderella, and which of them would be more exciting, like John Wayne or James Dean.

One day Casey overhears them, and burns Michael pretty badly for talking about boys, but Jackie kicks him in the shin and pushes him into the pool, taking Michael’s hand and pulling him away, cutting their pool day short and telling him to take her over to the Forman house.

Michael’s careful not to talk about boys with her in front of other boys after that, though, and later, when he gets older, he doesn’t do it at all, focuses entirely on girls and all of the ways they make his belly swoop and his neck hot beneath his collar. Jackie never tells, though, even when they’re older and they start to figure out what Casey was implying.

When she turns ten, two weeks after she starts the fifth grade, the youngest in her class, she has a sleepover birthday party with all of the pretty girls in her class. Michael’s invited, because of course he is, and the girls get loaded on too much sugar and giggle like crazy, talking about how, earlier that week, Pam Macey had been caught kissing a boy in Michael’s class.

That summer, Pam had spent most of it making fun of Jackie for not having to wear a training bra yet, so when Jackie’s lips thin in displeasure, he’s not surprised.

“So what?” she asks, a little shrill, and the girls quiet down and watch her with interest. “Michael and I kiss all the time!”

It’s news to Michael, but he catches sight of her quick wink and figures it out. The girls don’t know if they want to believe Jackie, and finally one of them, Barbara, speaks up, bold. “Show us, or it’s not true.”

Jackie’s not one to back down though, so Michael gets his first kiss with a bunch of ten year olds watching, and he feels his heart thumping way too fast in his chest, and thinks _oh, so this is love_.

Later, when the rest of the girls are finally asleep and Michael has scooted out of his sleeping bag to join Jackie up on her fluffy pink bed, she reaches over to hold his hand, squeezing tight.

“Was that okay?” she whispers, big eyes wide, and he nods.

“Are we boyfriend and girlfriend now, do you think?” he asks her, recalling what Casey had told him about _dating_, and how having a pretty girl on his arm would make him popular.

Jackie had heard the same talk, so Michael’s also not surprised when she nods back.

Michael’s own friends give him his fair share of disbelieving looks when he and Jackie show up in the basement the following week, still boyfriend and girlfriend, holding hands, but Michael’s just excited that he sometimes gets to kiss his best friend, even if he still finds kissing a little weird.

When Hyde shows Eric and Kelso a small handful of stolen spliffs and how to smoke them, Kelso swipes one to share with Jackie, helps her learn how to inhale without coughing. She gets giggly and silly, lets him take her shirt _and_ undershirt off so they can press their chests together while they kiss and he can paw around a little, unsure of what he’s doing.

Jackie’s the one to figure out how fun it is to inhale and then press her mouth against his mouth, exhaling smoke directly into his lungs, and it feels so romantic and close, once they figure out how to do it without wheezing and slobbering on each others’ chins.

So Michael and Jackie are going steady, and they do a lot of things together like studying and seeing movies and going to the high school football games, and, when Jackie decides it’s the right time, they progress farther on her sexual timeline.

They spend less time in the Forman’s basement, and, soon enough, Jackie stops visiting at all, busy with her determination to become the most popular girl at school and forcing her way onto the varsity cheer team as a freshman, trying to keep up with the intense training regime and the stupid mind games that the other girls make her play along with. The more stressed out she gets at school, the less patience she has with him, going from patient and helpful when he struggles with his homework to rushed and a little condescending, finishing her own homework far earlier than he does and leaving him to get more and more confused with algebra and English.

Jackie becomes a frightening perfectionist, cries when she doesn’t pick up on a routine at first try, rips up any essay she writes that receives less than a perfect score, and it’s all Kelso can do to keep her head above water, misses the easier times of grade school and summer and just being best friends.

So when Pam Macey starts sending signals in the same week that Jackie refuses to speak with him for an admittedly poor-timed comment, Kelso does his level best to ignore her, thinks about how junior prom is coming up and lots of girls have sex the night of prom and if Jackie’s waiting for something special, that’d be the night she’s waiting for.

When Forman spends an entire night lamenting about how his new friend, Buddy, had thought he was gay, Kelso’s grateful to finally have a distraction from his own ridiculous love life problems, asking for the story again and again, listening to it with the kind of focus Jackie wishes he’d use in classes.

Things with Jackie seem to briefly get better too. Being a sophomore on varsity is still good but not _asking_ for trouble, which means she’s free to learn jumps and twists and flips without girls almost four years her senior making snide comments and outright hostile remarks.

But school keeps being too hard for him which means Jackie keeps yelling at him, crying and hanging up on him in the middle of phone conversations and his friends keep talking about how much he needs to dump her, and Pam Macey starts sitting next to him in history and laughs at his jokes and touches his leg and—

—well.

He’s furious and grateful in equal measures with Hyde, for taking Jackie to the prom in Michael’s stead, but he doesn’t know how to articulate that so he just acts annoyed and jealous and pouty until Jackie takes him back.

Holding her hand when she’s back to being loving and sweet is somehow just as good as getting to second with Pam Macey, and Kelso thinks one day he’s going to have to figure out what the hell is going on with that.

When they’re good, Kelso is happier than ever, loves laying on Jackie’s fluffy bed and talking to her, loves going to the mall and watching her try on clothes and sample fancy creams and lotions, with or without baby Debbie, who hangs onto Jackie’s every word with awe, loves going to clubs and dancing for hours with her until they’re exhausted and sweaty and a little drunk from sharing the drinks that leering old men keep buying for her.

Jackie is still his best friend, above everything else, and he wants to make her happy, even if he doesn’t always know how. Sometimes, when it’s been a particularly hard day, he thinks maybe someone else would do a better job at it.

It’s like needles all over his body when Hyde takes her out on a date, but he feels nothing but relief when the two of them continue as they had before: impassive with one another and definitely _not_ a couple. Soon after, Jackie starts softening towards Michael again, wants to get back together even though everyone knows she’s still smarting from all of his transgressions.

So when he impulsively asks her to marry him just to get her to stop looking at him so accusingly, he feels his stomach drop into his shoes when she says yes. All Jackie has ever wanted is to marry a prince who will rescue her from her parents and take care of her, but Kelso is _too young_ and _not ready_ and even though he wants to see her every day for the rest of his life, he doesn’t really know if it’s the same way his parents still love each other after seven kids.

He catches Donna, about to run away, and feels the idea, terrible and wonderful, curling in his chest, bursting from his mouth before he’s even really thought about what it would do to Jackie. When he figures that out, much, much, much later, he thinks that’s really the end of them.

Even if they get back together after that, the way he always agrees to because he still likes to make Jackie happy, it won’t be the same kind of relationship as it would’ve been if he hadn’t run off, that summer with Donna.

Doesn’t mean it isn’t horrible to find out she started fooling around with _Hyde_ while he was gone. They argue about it for weeks, him and Hyde, and him and Jackie. It comes out to this one detail: he is more hurt that no one told him than he is that they are together.

And they _are_ together, whether or not they want to admit it.

Hyde should have told Kelso, because that’s what friends do when they start dating their friends’ ex-girlfriends, and it’s annoying and hurtful that he didn’t. But _Jackie_ should have told Kelso, because they told each other everything, and that had been the case since he met her in his father’s office so many years earlier and she whispered that she felt like a huge problem that her daddy just had to deal with, while they hid under a desk with a bowl of terrible sweets.

It takes a while, and he definitely still hits on Jackie out of habit way more than Hyde would really prefer, but things go back to normal, sort of. They’re not awkward and combative with each other, anymore, at least.

The more serious Jackie and Hyde get in their relationship, the stronger Jackie’s friendship with Michael gets, complaining to him when she’s annoyed and gushing to him when she’s overwhelmed and giddy. Hyde isn’t thrilled that Michael spends as many days on Jackie’s bed being her best friend as he himself spends nights being her girlfriend, but that’s where he’s always been, and that’s where he plans to always be.

**Author's Note:**

> I'm kind of proud of this, tb_h_. Come talk to me on [tumblr](http://www.rosalinesbenvolio.tumblr.com/)!


End file.
